“Hip, Hip, hurrah” Antisemitic?

Peter Tudvad’s excellent Stadier på Antisemitismens Vej: Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (Stages on the way of antisemitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews) is full of interesting facts. I reported already how N.F.S. Grundtvig, a pastor in the Danish Lutheran Church, was a staunch defender of the Jews. Well, I learned something else very interesting last night. The English expression “hip, hip, hurrah” is possibly of anti-Semitic origin. It seems “hep” (or “hepp”) was a cry Germans used in the herding of goats. They also used it, however, to taunt Jewish men, It’s unclear, observes Tudvad, whether this was because it was an acronym for ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’ (‘Jerusalem is lost,’ an exclamation purportedly from the Roman conquest of Jerusalem and burning of the temple in the year 70) or because the beards of Jewish men were taken to resemble goats’ beards (pp. 38-39; see also, Tudvad’s reference to Alex Bein, Die Judenfrage. Biographie eines Weltproblems [The Jewish Question: the Biography of a Global Problem], [Stuttgard, 1980], vol. 2, p. 160). This, in any case, observes Tudvad, is the description of the expression Kierkegaard would have found in his copy of Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (General Encyclopedia of the Arts and Sciences), 2nd section, eds. Georg Hassel and Andreas Gottlieb (Leipzig, 1829), part 5, p. 361.

It seems “hep, hep” became the rallying cry not only of the mob violence that broke out against Jews across Germany in 1819, but also the violence that broke out against Jews in Denmark in the same year.

Welcome to “Piety on Kierkegaard.” I’m the Kierkegaard scholar M.G. Piety. I’m an associate professor of philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I’m the translator of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009) and the author of Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralistic Epistemology (Baylor, 2010). I moved to Denmark in the fall ... Continue reading →